Nelson Mandela's Clandestine 1962 Lagos Trip

In January 1962 Nelson Mandela, then a 43-year-old ANC operative working underground inside South Africa as the head of Umkhonto we Sizwe, slipped out of the country on a forged passport bearing the name 'David Motsamayi'. The trip, financed by the Pan-African Freedom Movement of East, Central and Southern Africa (PAFMECSA), took him to Tanganyika, Sudan, Ethiopia, Morocco, Algeria, Ghana, Senegal, Liberia and Nigeria, ending in London. The Lagos stop, recorded by the Nelson Mandela Foundation as one of his pre-imprisonment foreign visits, brought him into contact with sympathetic officials in Balewa's government and with the small ANC support network in Lagos. Mandela left Lagos for Algiers, where he underwent six months of guerrilla training with the FLN — training he never had the chance to deploy, as he was arrested on the road outside Howick on 5 August 1962 and would not leave a South African prison cell until 11 February 1990.